


Tales from the Void

by MiskatonicWhaler



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, One Shot Collection
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-04
Updated: 2015-07-13
Packaged: 2018-03-05 07:13:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3110816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiskatonicWhaler/pseuds/MiskatonicWhaler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of Dishonored AU one-shots.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Android/Cyborg AU

**Author's Note:**

> For this one-shot collection, I'm gonna try and go through at least the "General-themed AUs" from this list: http://digidestined4eva. deviantart. com/art/AU-List-Writing-RP-Art-Reference-414037496

Havelock looks over the Tower’s former chief of security with a critical eye, arms folded. “I know that we’re asking a lot from you, Attano. But Piero tells me that you’re the only man for the job, given your particular skill set. And, frankly, this is the best chance you’ll ever get at setting the record straight, and finding the girl of course. I’d say that’s more than worth the risks. So, then. Did we pull the right man from Coldridge?”

Corvo stares back at him, mulls it over. He already knows his decision; his “hesitation” is simply a chance to come to terms with what he is about to do… and to watch the admiral fidget.

After a long moment, he nods.

***

As he leans back in an old operating chair salvaged from god-knows-where, Corvo wonders if the scientist ever takes time to breathe.

“…why all these idiots keep buying that Elixir crap instead of my Remedy 2.0, I’ll never know. _Yes,_ they both offer basic protection against the Rat Plague and other malware, but my version also augments system performance at a higher level. Sokolov’s Elixir is better suited to a calculator than the types of hardware that it’s being marketed for…”

The rant has gone on for quite a while, and Corvo might have found it amusing in other circumstances. As it is, he is trying very hard to steel himself for an illegal procedure which has mixed results under the best of conditions, while Piero mills about gathering surgical implements and firing up the strange contraption that he has built in the center of his lab, especially for this purpose. Corvo has not asked, “Will it hurt much?” because he is not stupid. But he has endured six long months of torture, and survived; this time, the pain will be of his own choosing.

He takes another long swig of brandy, and pictures her face. What would she think of him at this moment, he wonders? Would she support his efforts, understand that this is probably the only hope he has of finding Emily, of righting the wrongs that were done to all of them? Or would she tell him that he is making a terrible mistake, that the risk is too great and he’s of no use to anyone if he dies, that… that a cyborg is no longer human, and unfit to be anywhere near their daughter?

Corvo thinks that he knows what her answer would be. He takes a deep, calming breath, and shuts his eyes.

***

In Coldridge, after his sessions with Sullivan, there was always a time of blackness. Sweet, blessed, unfeeling blackness, before he returned to the nightmare of reality.

This time, there is no blackness. He thinks there is pain, but not like anything he’s felt before. Sometimes… heat, sometimes cold – those are the closest words he can come up with to describe the sensation in the back of his mind. He thinks he is dreaming.

Around him in every direction, there is a soft blue light that stretches away forever. Scattered randomly throughout the blue space are what appear to be small islands, which drift about – or perhaps he is the one drifting. From a distance they look like stars of pulsing light, but as they move closer, they tend to resemble things that he recognizes – a tangle of wires, a crumbling building, an enormous motherboard… the courtyard of the Tower Corporation…

He senses himself being inexorably pulled toward the courtyard-island – whether by some outside force, or by his own curiosity, he doesn’t know. He seems to have a physical form in this dream-place, but he thinks it can’t be real, none of it is real, because his real self is unconscious in a chair or bed somewhere in the Hound Pits Cyber Cafe, trying desperately to recover from Piero’s procedure.

His feet step onto the courtyard-island, which feels solid enough, and his mind struggles to reconcile this with the fact that he is dreaming.

“Hello, Corvo,” says a voice. He looks up in surprise, half-resentful that he has not even had a chance yet to take in the island’s appearance.

A young man stands – no, _floats_ – across from him, his head tilted quizzically to one side. The stranger’s eyes are all-black, but not empty; a light seems to glimmer where his pupils should be, like an electric spark.

Corvo recognizes those eyes, although he has never seen them before. Everyone in Dunwall has heard the whispers – impossible rumors of an AI experiment gone rogue, of a ghost somehow trapped in the network, of an independent entity formed by the VoidNet itself as its complexity evolves far beyond human understanding… Corvo has never thought much of the rumors, until now.

The Outsider’s lips curve into a thin smile.


	2. Mafia AU

The sleek black car lurches to a sudden halt, jarring its passengers. “What the devil is going on out there?” demands a tall, dark man in a pinstripe suit, speaking with a slight accent.

The driver meets his eyes in the rear view mirror. “Just a bunch of kids, _signore._ Looks like we interrupted some kind of game.”

The man in the pinstripe suit scoffs. “A game? I’ll give them some sport. Gaspar!” he snaps, turning to a hulking figure seated beside him. Gaspar tilts his head in a silent reply.

The two men emerge from the car into the darkened street. The sun is nearly set, but the black Mercedes shines like obsidian in the glimmer of dusk. Its bright headlights illumine a group of scrawny youths up ahead. By now, many of them are pinned against doorways and walls to allow the car to pass, or are attempting to slink out of sight. The older ones, at least, know that such a polished coach in this crumbling district can mean nothing good for them.

The Duke tips his pinstripe hat at the remaining wide-eyed kids, and grins.

“My my, how terribly… _inconsiderate_ you are. Didn’t your parents tell you? These are _my_ streets now, and if I ever catch one of you filthy spawn blocking my way again I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

The youths say nothing, only stare blankly back at him… except for one little girl, who can’t be older than ten years, standing next to a lamp post near the car.

“We ha’n’t got parents, stupid –”

“Deirdre, hush!” whispers an older girl beside her, and little Deirdre does as she is told, instead sending a fiery glare at the Duke and his silent companion.

The Duke pinches the bridge of his nose. “There you see it, Gaspar, this is exactly what I’ve been telling you about – children these days simply do _not_ know when to shut up –”

Almost before anyone can blink, he pulls a gun from his jacket which he points at Deirdre, and then there is a terrible explosion of sound and when it is over the little girl has fallen to the ground. Her pretty head is now an incomprehensible wreck of flesh.

Nearly all the remaining kids turn to flee in an instant. But next to Deirdre, the older teen who had whispered a warning unleashes a horrid screech, a sound which grates on the ears. It amuses the Duke, so he laughs: a loud chuckle that echoes in the narrow street.

The teen freezes at the sound; her focus shifts instantly from the dead child to the laughing man. She turns, and moves in a sudden frenzy – as she passes in front of the car, her hands grab the gleaming silver gazelle ornament adorning the hood, wrenching it off – and then she is in front of the Duke, who in these few seconds is still caught between amusement and a sudden nervous confusion…

And then she is driving the wicked tip of the gazelle ornament into the man’s eye, shoving it in as deeply as it will go. There is blood but she doesn’t care, doesn’t notice it. All she sees is the blood pouring from Deirdre’s head and the blood-rage fuels her until the Duke collapses, quite dead.

The weight of his fall more than anything is what snaps her out of her frenzy.

With the rage spent, she turns to flee – but a hand latches onto her upper arm, yanking her back. The hand twists her arm and forces her to turn, until she is staring up at the looming, silent figure of Gaspar.

They both hear a car door open, as the Mercedes driver clambers out.

“You bitch, do you have _any idea_ what you’ve just done?” the driver shrieks, furious and white-faced, a sharp contrast to Gaspar’s emotionless front. Gaspar regards him while he holds the girl, as if he is still awaiting orders.

The driver picks up on this. “And _you,_ you bloody useless Serk, what are you waiting for? _Kill her!”_

Gaspar blinks, then nods. With his free hand he pulls out a jagged, partly-rusted knife. He raises it slowly toward the teen’s neckline, seeming to savor the moment. The girl struggles, but she can’t break free of the man’s iron grip…

“Actually, I’ve got a better idea,” calls out a voice.

The jagged knife freezes in midair as Gaspar hesitates, confusion twisting his features. That was not the hysterical voice of the driver… but then, who…?

The Serkonan man turns around, dragging the girl with him, and they both see it: someone is lounging on the roof of the Mercedes as if it is a sofa. The stranger is draped in a loose-fitting red jacket and long black gloves; they watch as he takes a deep draw on his cigar.

The Mercedes driver has backed away from the car several yards and is gaping at the stranger. _“You!_ But… what are you doing here?” His voice wavers nervously, his eyes darting from side to side as if he is thinking of running.

The stranger blows out a fine stream of smoke. “You know, I’m beginning to wonder that myself. Looks to me like the girl over there already did my job for me.” His voice is low and calm, rough around the edges. The blood-spattered teen finds it oddly reassuring…

Gaspar jolts a bit, as if he has just been reminded of something. He glances again at the girl and raises the knife once more, this time moving much more quickly than before.

Not nearly fast enough, though.

The knife is half an arm-length from her throat when a crossbow dart suddenly explodes through Gaspar’s hand. The bolt remains wedged in his flesh, but the force of the blow sends the huge man stumbling forward, and his grip on the girl finally loosens enough that she manages to break free just as he crashes to the ground.

Two more bolts rip into his back as he falls.

The Mercedes driver lets out a scream and dashes wildly toward the end of the street, ducking low to avoid projectiles. But the stranger in the red jacket has other plans for this one.

As the girl stares wide-eyed at the scene, the stranger raises one gloved hand which he clenches into a fist… and then he dissolves like black smoke into thin air. He reappears half a street away, standing almost right in front of the fleeing man.

Instead of a crossbow, he pulls out a long, broad blade, and allows the Mercedes driver to impale himself on the weapon as his momentum carries him forward, a shocked expression on his face. When the deed is done, the stranger pulls his knife out from the driver’s chest, wiping the blood on the dead man’s coat before returning it to the sheath on his belt. Then he clenches his fist again –

And is suddenly standing right in front of Billie.


	3. The Lost World

“Of _course_ they can’t name it ‘Jurassic Park.’ Everyone knows that velociraptors and pterosaurs lived during the Cretaceous Period, that’s elementary. A misnomer of such magnitude would simply be _un_ -acceptable – we’d be the laughing stock of the Academy…”

“Well, _I_ for one find it to be rather fitting. An anachronistic name for an anachronistic attraction… If that doesn’t sum up the essence of chaos theory, I shall eat my hat.”

Corvo ignored a faint urge to roll his eyes at the bickering scientists (or ‘chaotician,’ in Dr. Moray’s case, as the man was so fond of insisting). He concentrated instead on the ever-present whispers of the jungle around them, a dense and verdant tapestry of foliage teeming with strange chirps and clicks, rustling leaves and whirring insects. Most new visitors to the Lost Continent soon found themselves unsettled by its alien-ness; but this particular group of experts had not yet stopped heckling one another long enough to appreciate their eerie surroundings.

“Who cares what they call it?” Dr. Sokolov broke in, his words colored by a thick Tyvian accent. “As long as they have the specimens, gawkers will crawl out of the woodwork to come and see, the name be damned. …I assume, my dear, that you _do_ plan to eventually have dinosaurs on your dinosaur tour, right?”

Corvo shot the man a glare, but his employer did the talking.

Jessamine Kaldwin, CEO of TowerCorp and only child of its founder, laughed pleasantly.

“Ever a skeptic, Anton! I seem to recall you pestering my father years ago, insisting that his little ‘bloodfly circus’ dream was nothing more than a mindless money-drain.” Her beaming smile showed no trace of resentment, only a barely-contained enthusiasm for the expedition that would enlighten the good doctor once and for all. Corvo had to forcefully tear his gaze away, to better focus on his own important task.

“Hmph,” Dr. Sokolov muttered. “Not that the old fool ever listened… No disrespect, no disrespect intended. The man may have been off his rocker, but you’ve got to admire that kind of passion and tenacity.”

“And you, Dr. Joplin?” Jessamine inquired, an almost mischievous smile still hovering on her lips. “Are you a believer, or did you come all this way hoping to join your colleague here in panning the scientific breakthrough of the century?”

The small, bespectacled man shrugged his shoulders awkwardly. “Objectively speaking, it is far more likely that we are about to witness some sort of overgrown salamander, or perhaps an undocumented species of Pandyssian bullfrog, than the creatures you claim to have ‘reconstructed’… Of course, a _proper_ scientist must keep an open mind” –

_“Hush!”_

Corvo held up a hand in warning, gesturing for complete silence and praying that his academic companions had enough sense to comply.

There – he heard it again – a sound like a deep, unearthly groan, coming from somewhere beyond the thick tangle of brush to their right.

Relaxing slightly, the swarthy guide produced a well-used but still gleaming machete. His companions stared at him with round eyes, as if noticing his hardened build and survival gear for the first time. All except for his employer, who gazed at his physique with the same unabashed appreciation as always.

“Follow me,” he beckoned, and began clearing a path through the heavy growth. The scientists tended to get entangled in vines no matter what he did, and several times Corvo had to stop and hack one of them free, biting his cheek to keep from laughing at the expressions which greeted every skillful sweep of the machete.

At last they broke without warning into a wide clearing full of waist-high grasses and low shrubs. Dr. Joplin immediately began worrying over the myriad scratches and insect bites he had acquired during their trek, muttering and rummaging through his satchel for ointment of some kind – until Dr. Sokolov wordlessly placed a hand on top of his colleague’s head, and turned it so that Dr. Joplin was looking up and out across the clearing.

Dr. Joplin’s knees buckled.

A herd of brachiosaurs meandered lazily through the tall grasses, stopping here and there to pull at the leafy canopy with heavy teeth. The magnificent creatures towered above all but the most ancient trees, though the spectators also caught glimpses of juveniles flitting among their elders’ feet.

“Astonishing,” Dr. Sokolov breathed, sounding truly floored. The expression behind his bristly beard showed more emotion in that moment than it typically did in a full year’s time, and the TowerCorp executive did not miss this: her own grin was dazzling.

“‘Overgrown salamanders,’ I believe was the term Dr. Joplin preferred,” said Jessamine, casting a smug glance at the wiry man. Dr. Joplin did not protest, unable to lift his eyes from the spectacle of living, walking dinosaurs.

“How fast can they move?” Dr. Moray asked clinically. The only outward sign of his surprise was the lifting of his sharp brows, and a trancelike quality to his voice.

“Well, with the brachiosaurs I’m not sure,” Jessamine began, “but we’ve clocked the T. rex at thirty-two miles per hour” –

“C-come again?” Dr. Joplin sputtered, returning at last to the present. “I thought… I thought I heard you say you had a T. rex…” He laughed nervously at the absurd notion.

The CEO beamed. “That’s right – we have a T. Rex!”

Dr. Joplin keeled over in a dead faint.

***

Burrows’ fingers drummed an impatient rhythm next to his keyboard as he waited for his employer to finish her latest inane speech about workplace morale… as if keeping drones happy had _anything_ to do with maintaining high-stakes security in a _dinosaur_ -containment complex.

A complex which this absolute buffoon had seen fit to turn into an amusement park.

A hound fighter would have made a better manager, Burrows thought. At least they understood the proper ways of dealing with deadly beasts.

This Kaldwin girl wasted far too much effort on keeping everyone _happy_ – including the monsters – rather than spending her considerable resources on critical safety measures. It was only a matter of time until the whole venture would come crashing down around them, probably in flames.

The collapse might as well come sooner than later, before the park had a chance to draw in its crowds… and with Hiram Burrows well on his way to a brighter, and considerably more secure, future.

He idly thumbed the unmarked disk containing the code that would wipe out the park’s feeble security systems irreversibly, and waited.

***

Before the helicopter even made contact with the landing pad, Ms. Curnow was dashing madly towards it and yelling something unintelligible behind the noise of the chopper.

“What is it, Callista?” Jessamine coaxed once the craft had landed, as she stepped down from the pilot seat.

Her operations manager was frantic.

“It’s the girl – Emily! We can’t find her, Ms. Kaldwin! She was out in the field when the evac order came, and she hasn’t come back!”

One of Jessamine’s greatest talents as a leader was her ability to remain deadly calm in a crisis. But now, she blanched as white as eggshell, stumbling back into her co-pilot, who caught her with ready arms. Corvo’s touch seemed to revive her somewhat.

“Everyone in the ’copter, _now_. I’ll drive.”

It was Callista’s turn to pale, but she didn’t hesitate to climb into the flying deathtrap after her boss.

The helicopter leaped into the air a bit unsteadily, but somehow remained airborne. No one left on the ground took much notice of Dr. Moray running panicked among the fleeing crowds of workers, shouting “My wife! My wife is missing!” for all he was worth.

***

Emily didn’t fully understand what was happening; with most of the park’s systems down, she was too far afield to hear the loudspeaker messages, and her Blinkphone was out of range. But she knew something was very, very wrong when she witnessed a group of crested dilophosaurs tearing into a carcass of something that looked terribly like fresh kill.

There were _not_ supposed to be predators in this area of the park.

While the dilophosaurs were occupied with their meal, Emily stole away as unobtrusively as possible. She began picking a careful path in the direction where she remembered a supply shelter should be, used by the day-to-day operations team. Hopefully the group of predators she had witnessed were the only escapees from the restricted paddocks, but either way, the control room needed to be notified immediately.

She was hardly reassured when she reached the shelter, only to find the door swinging open in the breeze; closer inspection revealed an ominous triple gash gouged on the outer side of the door. There were no workers – or creatures – in sight, in the shelter or outside.

The communications device just inside the door would not come on. It was looking more and more like the problem, whatever it was, had to do with the park systems as a whole, rather than an isolated fluke. Emily swallowed nervously, but reminded herself that she was not without resources.

The equipment she chose was an old but trustworthy device powered by a glowing blue fuel pod, rather than being dependent in any way on the park network. She hauled it outside of the shelter with considerable effort, then carefully stepped into the device and powered it on.

The tallboy stilts came to life with a whir of the fuel pods, and Emily rose high above the grassy field where the shelter was located, nearly as high as some of the trees she could see behind the building. She now had a panoramic view of the wide, hilly expanse, watching a group of herbivores across the field, the curious long crests atop their heads bobbing up and down as they walked.

Suddenly some members of the herd began bellowing in panic, and they turned as one to flee.

Emily didn’t need to see more. She took a moment to steady her balance and get used to the odd sensation of stilt-walking, then urged the long mechanical legs into as fast a run as she could manage.

***

The pool was dark, vast, and deceptively still.

Vera Moray drifted serenely along the raised dock that the trainer would normally use, when the park was functional, as a platform to give her lectures, with an audience seated in the stadium overlooking this end of the pool.

At the moment the stadium was empty, the trainer fleeing with the rest of the staff when the alarm was sounded. But Vera knew she wasn’t alone. She was never alone, here, in this place.

A ripple shivered along the glassy surface of the water, and Vera paused, her breath caught in her throat. Now a shadow was visible deep in the murky depths, growing larger each second.

It didn’t quite break the surface, but it was a near thing. One huge, black, fathomless eye stared up at Vera and was gone in an instant, the shadow dissipating, the water smoothing once again as if nothing had ever slithered through its depths.


End file.
